There are various surgical procedures that require fixing soft tissue to bone or bone to bone to produce healing such as fixing a bone flap or bone implant to a patient's skull. For example, craniotomies are surgical procedures conducted to treat various brain injuries, including tumors and aneurysms. As part of a craniotomy procedure, the surgeon creates an opening in the skull. One technique is to drill several adjacent holes to define the periphery of the opening and then using a tool to cut between the holes. The surgeon can either remove an entire section of the skull, or cut a sufficient amount to bend the skull away to allow access to the brain or head region. The cut-out section is commonly referred to as a bone flap. In other cases, an implant may be required to replace a section of the skull that is missing. In both cases, the bone flap or implant must be secured or fixed to the surrounding skull after the surgical procedure is completed.
There are several existing devices for securing the bone flap or implant to the surrounding skull. Several of these devices include outer and inner disks that are connected by a stem, whereby the bone flap (or implant) and surrounding skull are sandwiched between the outer and inner disks. Typically during use, the outer disk is slidable along the stem toward the inner disk and is locked in place with a locking mechanism such as for example, a rivet, a frictional fit, or even a ratcheting member. While the ratcheting member has been the more desired locking mechanism, as a result of its use, the outer disk has a profile relative to the surrounding skull that tends to irritate the surrounding tissue and/or have undesirable cosmetic effects to the patient.